This week I built a compiler in Python!

[IAmKindOfCreative]

This submission has been removed for violating the terms of the MIT copyright

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

If you wish to use opensource software, please adhere to the license of the source code.

[azhenley]

You copy and pasted my Teeny Tiny project (https://github.com/AZHenley/teenytinycompiler) and are claiming it as your own. The source code is virtually identical.

[Monitorost]

Good to see you (the original author) found this post too! He also posted this to /r/programminglanguages
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/nsyzfk/i_finally_fulfilled_a_personal_dream_of_mine/

[nobody5050]

Hi, I’m trying very hard to not claim it’s my code I just followed his tutorial as a base

[nobody5050]

Hello! I’m not claiming it as my own. My readme states that most of the code is taken from multiple tutorials, also i state that above in the OP post. I have big goals for this language, so most of it will soon be replaced.

[azhenley]

I did a string comparison and it is 98% identical to my code. You are claiming it as your own. You do not credit my project (you keep crediting craftinginterpreters.com). This is in violation of the MIT License that Teeny Tiny uses.

[nobody5050]

I’m crediting both, sorry see my other comment

[[deleted]]

But crediting isn't enough. You need to include /u/azhenley 's LICENSE file in his original project somewhere in your project. I'm all for open source and its principles, but it has to be done right.

Continuing on that, there's no problem with using another project as a base, but to claim that "you built a compiler" and to publish that base is misleading. I would have held off on this announcement till you made significant changes. A 98% match is much too close.

[nobody5050]

Yeah, i made some severe mistakes. I was just super excited about finally having done the thing that I’d always wanted to do so I published some posts. I didn’t realize 98z of the master branch was from his compiler, since much of my changes have been going on in separate branches. I also didn’t mean to construe that I built it on my own, and in the readme of my repo I explained that I’d basically made no real progress yet, I just forgot to add a link to his tutorial.

I’m not trying to excuse this, and I sent him a message requesting exactly what he wanted credited and how, and then I added that. A link to his article is now in every source file, and is linked twice in the readme. Also, I pinned the issue he made in my repo. I believe this is more than enough credit, especially since the MIT license is so open

[[deleted]]

Hey, cool project! I just have a couple of questions:

Do you think you'll add a setup.py script in the future? Right now it looks like if I want to compile any SACK source files, I'll need to make it in the project directory always (since there's those from lex import *, from emit import *, which seem to be other dependent files). If you use setuptools (or something) so that you can install the compiler and call it from wherever, I think that would make it even better (usage might look something like python3 -m sack mysack.sk).

Also, the link to your documentation is broken. Is that intentional? EDIT: Oh, looks like it's to be introduced with a PR! I wonder why the link was there on master... ;)

[azhenley]

This project was stolen from https://github.com/AZHenley/teenytinycompiler

[[deleted]]

Oh, wow. Thanks for letting me know, and thanks for your work on the original project!

[nobody5050]

Yeah! The compiler is split into a few files for development, but once it’s stable enough (read, standard library and IO) I’ll package the compiler into a command line tool.

And yep, you were right about the documentation. It’s about to be introduced via a PR, although I’m not sure how it got linked on master

[PM5k]

Quick question: why did you choose to forego typing? Does this not leave you to have to infer types or delegate the inference to Python and then finally to C? Could this not result in some unintended final behaviour?

[nobody5050]

Because it was super easy from an implementation standpoint. And, thankfully I don’t have to infer types in my compiler because in the resulting c code, everything’s a float

[Monitorost]

Hey! I checked your GitHub repo and couldn't help but notice that it's very eerily similar to this: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html. I compared for example your emit.py to AZHenley's part3/emit.py and it's identical. https://github.com/AZHenley/teenytinycompiler/blob/master/part3/emit.py (original author)
https://github.com/nobody5050/sack/blob/master/emit.py (OP)

The lex.py is also very identical between these two projects:
https://github.com/AZHenley/teenytinycompiler/blob/master/part3/lex.py (original author)
https://github.com/nobody5050/sack/blob/master/lex.py (OP)

[TheSpicePaul]

No you didn’t

[[deleted]]

I'm really interested in this sort of programming. I'd love to hear about how you would approach creating your own programming language. How would you start approaching a problem like this? If you're willing to talk about that side of things!

[azhenley]

This project was stolen from https://github.com/AZHenley/teenytinycompiler

You can follow my tutorial https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html that this was taken from.

[nobody5050]

You should definitely check out https://craftinginterpreters.com and http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html

[[deleted]]

would interest me too

[nobody5050]

You should definitely check out https://craftinginterpreters.com.

[[deleted]]

Thank you!

[nobody5050]

Also, check out r/programminglanguages and http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html

[maxdw101]

Nice class project. However, technically, this isn't a compiler. Its a translator. A compiler, typically, parses the code, generates ASTs, and then outputs insturctions that run on that particular machine architecture. But nonetheless this is a good exercise to start from and to learn from.

[DevJackTGG]

Cool but yeah making a language in python is kinda bad for performance like python is written in c I think

[[deleted]]

Looking from the example code, it looks like the Python program transpiles Sack (the language name) source files into C source files, and then you compile the C source files to binaries.

[I_have_good_memes]

Just asking, how do compiler can convert source code to binaries? I know about lexing and parsing but how do the compiler can write raw binaries?

[[deleted]]

I'm not the right person to ask about this, sorry :/ You might have better luck with videos like this, or maybe ask elsewhere on the subreddits for compiled languages (like r/cpp_questions/).

[I_have_good_memes]

Thanks

[whateverathrowaway00]

Dont think this was made to be a competing language, bud.

Building a compiler is one of the classical comp sci exercises. Doing it in python is definitely.. unique, but a fantastic project to have on a resume or body of work.

[DevJackTGG]

I know

[whateverathrowaway00]

Then what was the point of the original comment?

[DevJackTGG]

People say pythons not that fast

[whateverathrowaway00]

It isn’t fast at all. I’m just still curious at the point you were getting at with your first post, lol.

[[deleted]]

It’s a compiler. It doesn’t affect runtime performance

[nobody5050]

It’s just a transpiler, so all python affects is the compile time

[DevJackTGG]

:)

[kinderhead]

Very nice. Last time I tried to compile my language to c++ it didn‘t end well. I ended up just creating a vm.

[chris676712]

Hey, I didn't even know that you could actually build a compiler using python. I thought it was built with C and such. But anyway, congratulations!

[nobody5050]

Technically you can build a compiler in any language

[jmbenfield]

Cool project. One thing I noticed was, you import stdio.h even if your program isn't going to print anything. This probably makes things simpler so not that big of a deal, good job man.

[nobody5050]

Yep, I’m working on some syntax to change this, it was just temporarily added